Visit to Vicente's in Quixayá

Vicente invited me to his family's home in Quixayá for lunch yesterday. Previously, I had thought that Quixayá looked relatively wealthy in comparison to some of the other aldeas. There is a large, covered "salón" at the pickup stop where school children have P.E., and a paved road takes you up past the salón and a family-owned convenience store to the community center, which is the home base for the health promoters and doubles as a clinic when visiting physicians give consultations in the community. Quixayá, despite lacking the impressive (and propagandistic) city planning of three resettlement communities (Tierra Santa, Totolyá, and Porvenir) that were built after landslides wiped out entire campesino plantation communities, nonetheless did not seem all that poor to me previously, at least on the basis of brief visits to the community center. Moreover, I thought that if Vicente, who is educated and displays certain behaviors associated with improvements in socioeconomic status (e.g., he and his wife plan to have only 1 child), lived in Quixayá, it was likely that it would be different from the other communities we are working in.

When I arrived, Vicente led me from the salón in a direction opposite to the one that takes you to the community center. We walked down a wide and surprisingly steep path--once paved, I think, now comprised of rubble--and turned onto a more narrow path between closely approximated one-story cement-block houses. Vicente indicated the house of one of his brothers; three steps later he pointed out the house of another brother, turning onto steps that led to an alley milling with women and children. This was his home--his wife stood at the end of the alley, washing at the open-air pila. We greeted her and stepped through an open doorway into Vicente's four-room house. The health promoter system is grass-roots and community-based--Vicente, as one of two paid health promoters, lives no differently from the population he seeks to serve through his monthly programming of health promotion activities.

...

I met Israel, Vicente's brother, who purportedly has studied pedagogy and Kaqchikel at the university level. I was confused to learn of Israel's educational background last week, because despite my frequent, insistent vocalization of the importance of Kaqchikel learning for the work I hope to do with the health promoters and community members, Vicente never mentioned that his brother had relevant experience. In any case, one reason Vicente had invited me to lunch was to speak with Israel about my objectives with respect to Kaqchikel and how he might be able to assist me.

Israel and I discussed the possibility of me moving in with them for language-learning. He said that perhaps I could spend the night during the week so as to sit with him in the evenings without having to worry about transportation back to SLT. He said he would call me next week when he is ready to have me.

...

Vicente became visibly anxious and embarrassed when I asked to use the restroom--he got up quickly and spoke to his wife, who was tortillando at the outdoor "pollo" (woodburning stove) shared by all the women in Vicente's extended family. They both turned and peered down the alley to see if Israel was home. There was no bathroom in their house, they explained, and only Israel had running water. I said it was fine, that I didn't really need running water, and Vicente reluctantly led me back through his house, explaining that all he had available was a "hoyo seco" ("dry hole," or outhouse latrine). Of course, Vicente's worry was unfounded--it was quite easy to use, as far as outhouses go, despite being built for clientele of Mayan stature--but I am warmed by his kind concern, and it is deeply humbling to imagine feeling his embarrassment when entertaining visitors in my own home.

...

Vicente later led me to the cliff behind his house to show me where the highway turns above the river between Quixayá and another community called San Juan Mirador.

Standing there at the edge, looking out over the ravine, Vicente began speaking, painting a political geography of the lush, hilly land surrounding Quixayá. On the other side of the river is San Juan Mirador and the former campesino plantation community owned by the family Miramar. Miramar started a dairy factory (Parma, which, according to multiple return short-term volunteers, serves "the best icecream in the world," and which the new U.S. American parish "co-administrators" have similarly raved about) on the plantation land adjoining the campesino plantation community. After a few years, the national goverment imposed its own regulations, requiring the finquero (plantation owner) to relocate the entire community a certain minimum distance from the factory. Some people were able to get out at that time, moving to San Juan Mirador and other aldeas; others, however, could not. Miramar did not have enough land on his own finca (plantation) to house the remaining campesinos, so he bought half of the adjoining plantation of Quixayá. Vicente told me that his family originally lived on the land bought by Miramar, and I was struck by the realization that Vicente is the descendant of indigenous Mesoamericans gifted into a system of slavery, and, later, debt peonage, to cruel and absentee criollo landowners. In the 1990's, the parish bought the other half of Finca Quixayá--land that is rocky, steep and high above the river, and therefore less safe, arable, and aesthetically pleasing, but nonetheless affordable and habitable. It was then that Vicente's parents moved off the finca. The parish--in large part due to Fr. Greg's persistent dream of preserving traditional Mayan agricultural lifeways, which is informed by community elders who advise him--has been very successful in effecting land reform where the government has failed miserably (so much so, in fact, that the government made a huge effort to assist the parish in relocating landslide victims--and then proceeded to put up huge signs showing the balance sheet of the construction effort: apparently, the campesino plantation community members contributed nothing, which is complete and utter bullshit--they and their ancestors gave hundreds of years of uncompensated, backbreaking labor and suffered preventable and treatable disease, violent discrimination, and premature death to allow the concentration of the very wealth that permitted the huge outpouring of government support to rebuild their homes).

Vicente pointed at Miramar's new land--once the land that his family lived on--noting the ample road that had been built and the manicured foliage by the river: "He wants to make that land into a nature resort, something touristic or something." Beautiful land where at least 12 families (this is the number of families that recently left Quixayá for a new, more remote settlement because of overcrowding) could be building houses and lives is populated instead by a lawn and a row of palms--brought from the coast, I imagine, they will never bear fruit at this altitude. So the land lies fallow and overgrown except in patches where a gardener has been put to work, waiting for Miramar to send a decree from his home in Guatemala City to finish the landscaping in preparation for criollo and gringo tourists seeking to unwind and soak up the wonders of this "natural" paradise.

Vicente brought my attention to a large cement container: "The patrón buys elote (the stage at which corn is tender enough to eat on the cob but before it is mature enough to dry and grind into cornflour) and he stores it there. This way in the summer he doesn't have to worry about how to feed his cows--he can produce cheese all summer without any problems. But he buys so much elote that there is not enough mazorca (mature corn that can be used to make cornflour) during the harvest--and we have to pay higher prices for our corn to make tortillas. Because we are accustomed to corn. The patrón is very bad with the people." Vicente is rarely this candid, and I was surprised--and glad--to hear him speak this way. I think his openness was situational--it was a weekend, we were standing in his own community, and he was, for the moment, not representing the parish or the health promoters or anyone else except himself and his family and his people.

...

Quixayá is beautiful, and I am excited by the prospect of studying Kaqchikel with Israel, living in an aldea, and having more candid conversation with Vicente.